Many industries employ sophisticated manufacturing equipment that includes multiple sensors, controls, and robotic components, each of which may be carefully monitored during processing to ensure product quality. The robotic components require calibrations to accurately define preset positions of the robot system's mechanisms to ensure that the system functions properly. By calibrating the mechanical mechanisms of the robot, proper handoff of objects can be established between the robot and manufacturing equipment components (e.g., loading station, auxiliary chambers, process chambers). Robot calibrations are required for various reasons including after initial installation, after servicing a component, preventive maintenance, restarting or recalibrating the manufacturing equipment, and any other time that the robot's absolute positioning may have changed.
For some manufacturing equipment (e.g., semiconductor fabrication equipment, automotive manufacturing equipment) it is expensive and time consuming to completely shut down the equipment for the time necessary to perform the calibrations. Conventional methods of performing calibrations generally require completely or partially shutting down the equipment. For example, calibrations for robotic components of semiconductor processing equipment is generally performed by taking the equipment off-line from normal manufacturing operations. A robot that needs to be calibrating for transferring wafers to and from a processing chamber requires taking the processing chamber off-line (e.g., removing process gases, altering pressure, voltages, magnetic field, etc), opening the processing chamber and manually performing calibrations. Typically, maintenance personally align a pin or jig into a component of the processing chamber and then manually perform calibrations between the robot handling system and the processing chamber. After calibrations have been completed, the pin or jig is physically removed, and then the lid of the processing chamber is closed. Manufacturing personnel will then perform qualifications on the processing chamber prior to returning the chamber on-line.
Other prior approaches have attempted to minimize the time and expense of taking manufacturing equipment off-line by using a disc shaped similar to a wafer such that the robot can load and unload the disc into various types of manufacturing equipment. However, this disc requires camera technology for performing the calibrations between the robot and various types of manufacturing equipment. The camera technology must be taught to align to various types of targets found in the manufacturing equipment creating additional complexity and expensive in terms of time, cost, engineering and/or maintenance resources for performing the robot calibrations.